For as long as I can remember, I ha

For as long as I can remember, I have really liked macapuno candy. I also liked macapuno tarts, macapuno ice cream and macapuno strings in halo-halo. But now that I think about it, I have never actually seen a macapuno! Have you? So when I saw these husked coconuts for sale at the market the other day with a sign that said Macapuno or Makapuno, how could I resist? They looked exactly like a regular coconuts but they seemed to weight more and felt less hollow. At PHP40 per piece, they were way pricier than say the PHP8-10 regular coconuts… Macapuno nuts are actually aberrant coconuts. Nuts whose genetics short-circuited along the way and whose fruit are delightfully different from a regular coconut.

Not sure if these nutty nuts occur in other countries (I would guess they do) but they mac2certainly have achieved an elevated status in the Philippines. It seems that once a tree bears macapuno fruit, some but not all, of its fruit for as long as it lives turns out to be macapuno. But you can’t raise it and it just occurs naturally or unnaturally, for that matter. A lot of work has gone into figuring out how to successfully propagate macapuno but I’m not sure if it is completely successful yet — at any rate, planting a macapuno nut does not guarantee the growth of a macapuno tree! And I would guess that less than 1-2% of all trees ever bear macapuno nuts. So what was it like? Opened up, it was bizarre, cool and unexpected. The meat was incredibly thick and there was no water in the center of the fruit, more like a clear gelatin. The meat was easy to scoop out and surprisingly, didn’t taste like much, but it was definitely different from a regular coconut…